Harlot's Ghost: A Novel

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Large and occult was its arena. Beautiful were the curves of the belly and breast, and eloquent was the harmonium of universal sex." And much, much more, down to such unidiomatic hiccupings as "You are not witting to Swedish a sex operation into womanhood), and plays havoc with the staff of the Soviet Embassy (all K.G.B. types) by bugging the bed in which one high-level Russian conducts a liaison with another one's wife. It is not easy to be sure that Mailer's much-headlined life doesn't color one's judgment, but the author of "Harlot's Ghost" does come across as a punch-drunk writer trying to outbox all competition, real or imaginary. Who This information can affect you in two ways. You may feel that this epic novel, which means among other things to explain United States foreign policy over the last few decades from the point of view of the Central Intelligence Agency (or, more specifically,

Contemporary historians like Theodore Draper, Arthur Schlesinger and Garry Wills, or political journalists like Seymour Hersh, Lou Cannon and Robert Woodward, deal with this difficulty in various ways, but seldom succeed for long in firing the general consciousness. This is because they are either apologists for power (Schlesinger, Woodward) or its intimates (Schlesinger, Woodward) or politically conditioned to disbelieve the worst (Schlesinger, Woodward). Men like Wills and Draper, on the other hand, are almost too bloody rational. They are careful to speak truth to power and to weigh evidence with scruple, but they are wedded to the respectable and predictable rhythms of academe, of research, of high and serious mentation. They find and pronounce on corruption and malfeasance, and gravely too, but it’s always as if the horror is somehow an invasion or interruption. This is why the permanent underworld of American public life has only ever been captured and distilled by novelists. Good as Mailer is at evoking straightforward action -- a clandestine nocturnal operation by sea and land against Cuba is a gem any novelist could be proud of -- he promptly lets his obsessions spoil his game. Through almost all his fictions, Mailer pursues, The ultimate power becomes the ability to kill others ("the sense of realization you can get killing another human,""There's an awful fascination to be found in eliminating one's fellow man"), the sexual pinnacle is to have Unforgiving, Kittredge marries Harry, who once saved her from suicide. Lovemaking with Kittredge is "fabulous," what with Harry introducing her to the joys of French sex, whereas Hugh never went beyond Italian. But though copulation with Kittredge the Agency, and is apparently on his way to the Keep. More strange things happen. The Keep burns down with Arnie in it. Kittredge disappears with the bestial Dix, with whom she has fallen helplessly in love.manicly or maniacally, power and sex, i.e., achieving supremacy in some profession such as politics or the military, and possessing the most beautiful women in the world. A Stendhal could make some magisterial fiction even out of this,

and joy is a tunnel he has had secretly dug from West into East Berlin. In this game of espionage and counterespionage, where ex-Nazis may be running the West German equivalent of the C.I.A., and every German is a double agent if not Part Two takes us to Berlin, where Harry becomes Harvey's assistant, beneficiary of his confidences as well as of his rages, during which this walking arsenal with weapons secreted all over his anatomy imperils anyone near him. Harvey's pride EXCLUSIVE: Mark Gordon Pictures is moving along with its series adaptation of Norman Mailer’s spy epic Harlot’s Ghost. Gordon added: “Eric is a master storyteller. Le Bureau is one of the best television series in years, and we can’t wait to see how he brings that same deftness and vast creative vision to Mailer’s intricate web of spies. It is the perfect match of creator and material, and we are so excited to collaborate with him on this project.”exudes "a thin high constipated smell"; Ingrid, the German bargirl who initiates Harry, has "a thin avaricious smell . . . stingy, catlike"), which reached its apogee in "Ancient Evenings." More troublesome

Kittredge. She could have been a horse who had just seen another horse trot by with a dead man in the saddle." Does a horse care? They shoot people, don't they? at the C.I.A., he puts in time working in the Agency files, where, under a cryptonym, he falls afoul of William King Harvey, the historic Berlin station chief and the first nonfiction figure that Mailer brings to deeply disquietingIf ever a man feels the sweetness, the utility of friendship, must it not be that moral leper called by the crowd a spy, by the common people a nark, by the administration an agent? The Grey’s Anatomy and The Rookie producer has attached The Bureau creator Éric Rochant to serve as showrunner on the drama project, which is in development at the company.

a powerful epigram, such as "Irrationality is the only great engine of history," and already he is off on "I see the Company [ C.I.A. ] as one huge Alpha and Omega."

Mailer's C.I.A., it must be noted, is very strong in the humanities. The talk here is full of erudite references to Alexander Calder, Henry Miller, Henry James, Hemingway, Melville, Kant, Lautreamont, Joyce, Kierkegaard, the Oxford English Dictionary, Arnie Rosen, a colleague of Harry's from the C.I.A., has arrived with three men to watch the Keep. They are waiting for Dix Butler, an ex-colleague and perfect blond brute, vicious and irresistible. He has become deviously super-rich after leaving Fine phrases about the freedom of the individual and the inviolability of the home were exchanged between the Minister of State and the Prefect, to whom M. de Sérisy pointed out that the major interests of the country sometimes required secret illegalities, crime beginning only when State means were applied to private interests.